Travels in and near NJ in quest of nature's beauty

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Hancock’s Bridge

Great Consolation for Eleanor Roosevelt in Major Family Tragedies of Her Life

But IS there any consolation for me, for us, for environmentalists, for the Planet?

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I have so many beautiful new nature experiences to share.

Marvelous examples of fellowship, usually wrapped in nature.

Luminous times – whether with the short-eared owls of the Pole Farm just now, or savoring Epiphany’s King’s Cake with Janet Black and Jeanette Hooban, when Janet was out here from Manhattan for her Epiphany birthday celebration.

But I cannot rhapsodize. Not even Nature herself blinds me to the horrors of tomorrow, January 20, 2017. Doomsday to me; and, I fear, to the Planet itself, to Mother Nature herself.

My new pictures will remain in their files

Recent epiphanies will not be shared.

Instead, I offer the only poem that comes to mind — written in 1919, on the hem of the First World War — which I always thought was looking back into time — which turns out to have been prophecy.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I don’t know about the rest of my NJWILDBEAUTY readers, but this one has had to cancel far more nature excursions than she’s taken in recent months.

Wild Weeds in Wild March Wind, Absecon Bay, Atlantic City — What Greeted or Prevented Me, Most of This Year

With any luck, I’ll be down in Salem and Cumberland Counties, on the Delaware Bayshore, searching for spring above all, and birds — eagles everywhere — all day Sunday.

American Bald Eagle by Brenda Jones

I’ll gather a few more scenes from other journeys, other seasons, to the wild and watery reaches of Salem and Cumberland. With any luck, I’ll have new ones for you soon…

Salem Sail

Salem Oak, Salem Town, Salem County

Lenni Lenape Grinding Tool in Greenwich, Salem County

Alloways Creek near Hancock’s Bridge, where British Massacred Sleeping Colonists in Hancock House

Proud List of Tea Burners in Greenwich — Our Own Tea Party — Descendants Still Live in Town

Majestic Facade, Historic Hancock House on Alloway Creek

Alloway Creek in Peacetime

Bivalve Egret Lineup

Bivalve Venerable/Vulnerable Building

Conshohocken Specialty

You can see, when we’re in Salem and Cumberland, driving down every road that says “NO EXIT”, for all roads lead to the Bay, “we are not in Kansas any more…”

Bateman’s Live Crabs

Delaware Bay Truck Painting

The reason these austere and pristine beauties, this historic sites, may still be experienced, is that humans work very hard to preserve them. As NJWILDBEAUTY readers know, I spend the major portion of my life furthering preservation of New Jersey land. Believe it or not, thought the Delaware Bay is very far from us, we are working very hard to preserve its waterways, marshes, meadows, farmlands and, above all [for me, and especially for our winged brethren], bird habitat.